Education and Its Contradictions
Despite the trauma of her first experience at White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, Zitkála-Šá returned for additional schooling. She spent three years at the school initially, returned to the reservation for a period, and then went back for more education.
This decision — and the way she reflected on it later — is one of the more complicated elements of her story. She was, by the accounts that survive, a student of exceptional ability, particularly in music. The violin, in particular, became one of the threads of her development — she had a talent for it that the school’s musical education could develop, and music became one of the paths through which she moved forward in the Anglo-American world while maintaining a creative life that expressed who she was.
The contradiction she was navigating is real and should not be simplified. She chose to continue her education in a system she had already experienced as traumatic. The reasons for that choice are not fully documented in ways that allow certainty about her motivations. But the choices themselves, and their outcomes, are documented in the record she left.
She eventually attended Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, arriving in 1895 when she was approximately nineteen years old. Earlham was a Quaker institution, and her connection to it came through the same Quaker networks that had recruited her to the boarding school in the first place. But at Earlham, she was a college student — not a child being processed through a system designed to eliminate her identity — and she performed with a distinction that gave her visibility.
At Earlham, she won a prize in an oratorical contest, competing against students from multiple Indiana colleges. The speech she gave was noted for its quality. This was not a minor achievement — a young Dakota woman competing in and winning oratorical competition against Anglo-American college students in 1896 was a demonstration that the talent she possessed was real and substantial.
She also experienced, at Earlham, the specific kind of racism that mixed public recognition with private dismissal. She won the contest, and she was targeted by anti-Indian imagery in a student publication from one of the competing schools. A banner mocked “the Indian” at the contest. She felt it, and she wrote about it later.
The pattern — achievement, visibility, then the specific reminder that the white world that was offering her a platform was also the world that could turn on her with contempt — was one she would navigate for her entire public career.